[matt4077]

It just goes to show that politics is really really hard. You never get to hear about the decisions that are easy. If it's reported in the media, it's almost by definition an issue with multiple viable options (or, in this case, only bad choices).

Having seen a bit of German politics from the inside, I can assure you that everyone grapples with choices like this. I've witnessed ministers of finance changing their opinion on life-or-death (for Greece) matters three times in a day. Not because they lack conviction or idealism, but because they have a set of believes that are sometimes conflicting. Plus lack of sleep, incomplete information etc.

I wish more of that process could be shown on TV, but politicians who actually voice these ambiguities are unfortunately seen as weak and thus at some point a decision is made internally and is then communicated with absolute confidence publicly.

Regarding Turkey: rest assured, they're never going to be an EU member if things don't change dramatically. Medium-term, Turkey does actually belong in the EU: it's got enormous economic potential, could be a bridge to the middle east etc. Maybe that should have actually happened in the 1995-2008 timeframe and we'd have a different Turkey today. But EU leaders closed the door back then, possibly b/c Turkey was too poor, probably also because there's always one EU head of state who's a fucking racist.

[antientropic]

We should count ourselves lucky Turkey didn't join the EU in 1995-2008. I'd rather have an authoritarian Turkey outside of the EU than inside. We have enough trouble with the likes of Orban and Kaczynski already.

And I don't follow the arguments for Turkey joining. Yes, it may have enormous potential; but nobody would say Mexico should join the US just because it has potential.

[k-mcgrady]

>> "We should count ourselves lucky Turkey didn't join the EU in 1995-2008. I'd rather have an authoritarian Turkey outside of the EU than inside."

On the other hand wouldn't they be subject to certain laws to prevent or reduce the authoritarianism if they were part of the EU?

[nickik]

The EU was designed with lots of hops that a country had to jump threw but because for political (even idiological reason) those things always gets ignored if they are in the way of the larger planes. Greece for example should never ever have been able to join the EU given the rules that existed and we can see how that turned out.

The EU simply has very little oversight of internal politcs of countries and because there is no way you can be kicked out, once you are in, you can do pretty much as you want. That is, as long as you don't need massiv amounts of financial aid.

[return0]

The EU is not the eurozone. Greece entered the EEC in 1981. Get your facts straight and please spell check.

[Tomte]

Poland is steering a very problematic course, but who cares when we don't even act on Hungary, which is much closer to a dictatorship than Turkey.

[Natanael_L]

Good luck enforcing it

[k-mcgrady]

Remove privileges. No democracy? Fine, no freedom of movement. Turkey would need the EU a hell of a lot more than it needs Turkey. Of course I'm not sure whether legally they can agree to sanctions like I suggested.

[Ntrails]

When I have political discourse with people the aspect that makes me the most irritable is the implication that it's simple. Politicians are corrupt, stupid, or both - and if they'd just do "x" everything would be better.

Even when politicians do the right things (get a panel of experts to write a detailed report, and then try to act on the findings) - headlines contain only the barest hint of the depth of the analysis and the findings are chastised by various ill informed commentators who don't even bother to read the damned reasoning.

I actually feel sorry for those trying to govern.

[macintux]

Trump makes it sound so simple.

[cnlevy]

It only because he hasn't governed yet. Wait until, say, a year after he has become president, and made some mistakes he had to pay for ...

[Htsthbjig]

It is interesting that you insult everyone that disagrees with you: "Fucking racist".

It looks like you are so unsure about your own arguments that you need insulting them to feel better.

The main reason EU closed the door to Turkey had nothing to do with race(their race is the same of Europeans'), and everything to do with culture and religion, specially religion.

You could disagree with them and their arguments, but insulting them is not ok.

Turkey is a Muslim country. People like Erdogan don't like Western values, he is very clear about that, they prefer a Muslim theocracy in which every part of life is controlled by this (non sense) book written 1500 years ago.

To think seriously about the consequences of letting a hundred million Muslims entering Europe is not racist, it is the politicians' job.

[sydneysider]

Blaming this on 'racism' is a poor argument. Maybe it has something to do with the incompatible cultures and values.

[Cenk]

"incompatible cultures and values" are almost exactly the words these racists have always used to keep Turkey out. Britain, Spain, Greece, Cyprus and Slovakia are all compatible, but Turkey is a step too far?

[jerf]

The easy post would be to point out that "racists once made that argument" is basically a slightly cloaked ad hominem attack trying to accuse your opponent of racism, without doing it clearly in a way that could be denied.

But the more interesting post is to point out that if you allow racists the power to destroy an entire line of argumentation for all purposes forever by using it, you are ceding to them enormous power to control the discourse, even accidentally, by completely determining the bounds of acceptable debate.

Racism is bad, but the way we treat it as radioactive waste nowadays has itself become a danger to society. It's merely bad. It is not the One True Sin, it is not the cause of all life's problems, it is not the One Temptation in life that if resisted means we can stop worrying about our moral status, it is not something that permanently twists everything it touches into an eternerally-unredeemable black goo, even ye unto a dozen generations. It's merely a bad thing that hurts people. Giving it the power to be those other things is an error too.

So, yes, it is perfectly valid to address the question of "incompatible cultures and values". Of course, it does require one to admit that cultures have values that can differ from one another, which is, admittedly, a door that once you walk through does suddenly make a lot of the prepackaged really "nice" answers in current discourse suddenly obviously too oversimplified to be useful for any purpose, but such is reality.

[tim333]

In Germany Holocaust denial is illegal and you can get imprisoned for it. In Turkey it is required to deny the Armenian Genocide where the Turks killed a million or so Armenians, an act the word genocide was invented to describe. In Turkey you can get imprisoned for saying it happened. That's a fairly major incompatibility to deal with.

[ousta]

you can deny holocaust in many european countries...

[morgante]

But you can't get arrested for saying it happened in any European countries.

[trco]

In France you can get imprisoned for holocaust denial. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial

Art 9. – As an amendment to Article 24 of the law of July 29, 1881 on the freedom of the press, article 24 (a) is as follows written: <<Art. 24 (a). - those who have disputed the existence of one or more crimes against humanity such as they are defined by Article 6 of the statute of the international tribunal military annexed in the agreement of London of August 8, 1945 and which were a carried out either by the members of an organization declared criminal pursuant to Article 9 of the aforementioned statute, or by a person found guilty such crimes by a French or international jurisdiction shall be punished by one month to one year's imprisonment or a fine.

[Crespyl]

Those countries do not have a state-enforced opposition to historical facts.

[ousta]

yes we all know history is hard science. not talking about the genocides here.

[jbmorgado]

I, for one wouldn't be welcoming a country in EU that is now committing genocide against the Kurds for almost 3 generations.

I also wouldn't be welcoming a country that refuses to acknowledge the full independence of another EU member state (Cyprus).

If you want to play the racism/xenophobia card and pretend that these are not the big issues we have against Turkey in EU go ahead, but I can't tell you that you are not convincing anyone.

[Cenk]

>I also wouldn't be welcoming a country that refuses to acknowledge the full independence of another EU member state (Cyprus).

Really? Because Cyprus would:

>Cyprus is in favor of Turkey's Accession to the EU with the hope it will facilitate a viable and just solution of the Cyprus Problem. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_relations_of_Cyprus#Tu...)

[mschuster91]

Nah, it was the German govm'ts fear of public backlash due to the fucked-up integration of Turkish immigrants. Public opinion in Germany was not Turkey-welcoming at the time.

The current situation is just Erdogan having his revenge on Europe for dropping Turkey.

[calibraxis]

If EU were decent, they'd delist Erdogan's enemy the PKK from the terrorist list. The PKK could teach the EU how to improve European society: (http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/30/opinions/rojava-kurds-syri...)

Not to mention the PKK would obviously help end ISIS.

[0xFFC]

This is pure nonsense. Are you kidding me ? do you have any idea what you are talking about ?

Even Iraqi Kurds trying to ban PKK because they know what's going on in that organization. Even Kurds in turkey are not happy with PKK. They want a reform , but most of them wants stay in turkey, while the "being Turkish citizen definition changed".Look at how popular HDP is in Kurdish areas in Turkey.

You have no clue what are you talking about. for further reference , please read/listen to Henri Barkey from Woodrow Wilson which is well respected political scientist.

[dang]

This comment, and others that you've posted (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11399333) break the HN guidelines badly by calling names and being personally rude. We ban accounts that do those things, so please don't do them. In particular, please edit phrases like the following out of your posts to HN:

  This is pure nonsense.

  Are you kidding me?

  do you have any idea what you are talking about?

  You have no clue what are you talking about. 
 
  wasting people times in HN

Notice how much more substantive your current comment becomes if you take out all these rude bits? That's what we're going for here.

Hard politics isn't a great fit for HN to begin with, but if you're going to contribute to such discussions as inevitably arise, it's important to follow these rules—particularly when others are being wrong and provocative.

(None of this is a comment on your politics, only on how you're presenting them. The same applies to all HN users.)

[0xFFC]

Thanks for notifying, but I don't have editing option on those comment. I would be glad to edit them but I don't have option to do (I don't know why).

[tomhoward]

Editing of a comment is only possible for 2 hours after posting. This is to prevent people from trying to "rewrite history" at any time in the future.

But in a case like this, dang may be happy to let you edit or delete the comment.

You should email [e-mail] to request this.

[calibraxis]

Rather than mislead everyone, why not quote what exactly you disagree with, and offer evidence?

- "How could Isis be eliminated? In the region, everyone knows. All it would really take would be to unleash the largely Kurdish forces of the YPG (Democratic Union party) in Syria, and PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ party) guerillas in Iraq and Turkey. These are, currently, the main forces actually fighting Isis on the ground. They have proved extraordinarily militarily effective and oppose every aspect of Isis’s reactionary ideology." (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/18/turkey-...)

- Erdogan went apeshit after HDP deprived him his parliament majority: "The cynicism behind Erdogan’s calculation to launch a full-scale war against the PKK is stunning." (http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/09/21/erdogans-deadly-ambition...)

- “'Kurdish people are fighting for our rights, and Turkey is trying to finish us off,' says 53-year-old Ramazon Sakci as he stands in the garden of his home, which is riddled with bullet holes.” (http://www.thenation.com/article/turkey-is-fighting-a-dirty-...)

[dang]

> Rather than mislead everyone

That's a form of personal attack which is inevitably provocative of a much worse thread. Please edit such rudeness out of your posts here. Your question would have been fine, and less self-undermining, had you done so.

[calibraxis]

When faced with abusers [1], it may be mentally healthiest to briefly indulge in slightly-unpleasant words like: "Rather than mislead everyone..."

Why? Abuse stays with people during the day, and it is better to ever-so-slightly reflect it back on the abuser, than for it to come out on your employees (or friends, children, dog...)

[1] "You have no clue what are you talking about", "how much people can be stupid and naive", etc.

[0xFFC]

You don't have clue what you are talking about.Read and listen to serious scholors instead of wasting people times in HN.

[calibraxis]

Irony: I recall your recent post telling everyone to read Chomsky. He recommends supporting and de-listing PKK too! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vbkqk5WLbLs)

[return0]

Turkey, unlike most of the middle east in the news, descends from a multicultural, religiously tolerant empire (Ottoman). The culture is not far different from Greek. There is a regression to islamism with erdogan, but i don't think that's a permanent thing now. There is definitely some racism here.

[jakub_h]

> "descends from a multicultural, religiously tolerant empire (Ottoman)"

Where the terms "multicultural" and "religiously tolerant" apparently mean something quite a bit different from today (just like Athenian democracy from ours, for example).

[return0]

I don't think they are that different. Even romans had multiculturalism. Tolerance was not invented in the modern West.

[jakub_h]

Well, Romans, from what I can tell, had better multiculturalism than Ottomans centuries later. They did not split the society into religion-based classes. So "the West" was quite a bit more progressive centuries earlier in some ways.

[fauigerzigerk]

No, I don't think it's racism. It's islamophobia, specifically a hostility towards the conservative trends within Islam that have become so much more dominant than they used to be. And faith based hostility absolutely goes both ways.

I know this is a taboo subject, but we should stop acting as if religion was a racial attribute. It's not. Religions are opinions, and people will have to accept that others will take those opinions into account when it comes to forming a political union.

The difficult thing is that only individuals can hold opinions but only countries can join the EU. So we are forced by the very nature of this decision to make a summary judgement that ignores individual opinions and therefore will be very unfair to some.

This is something I am personally struggling with when it comes to Turkish EU membership.

[return0]

A major reason is that Turkey has invaded and occupied part of an EU member (Cyprus). Granted, this issue may be solved soon, but many EU politicians hide behind issues like this to avoid stating the major issue: avoiding mass influx of turkish citizens to EU countries. Most european countries are not ready for this (Turkey has population similar to germany) and turkey has large young population.

[tomp]

For all intents and purposes, Turks are white (i.e. the same race as the rest of Europe).

The issue, however, is religion. EU has enough problems as is with religion (less than the US, and less than it used to have, but still), but still people are wary.

Although IIRC Turkey used to be less religious than it is now, under Erdogan.

[treehau5]

The "race" of Europe, if you could categorize it into such broad terms, would be better suited as "Western", "Eastern", and "Mediterranean", but even that isn't apt.

For most Turks, you couldn't tell the difference between them and Iranians, IMO. Nonetheless, you can definitely tell them apart from a Western white European, a Eastern Slavic-Rus European, and a Mediterranean European.

[eternalban]

Permit this Iranian born to disagree. Turks are generally paler, and have hard eyes.

Armenians, due to historic ties going back thousands of years, look far more Iranian.

[treehau5]

Duly noted.

[tomp]

Plenty of Greeks, southern Italians and Spaniards are darker than e.g. Erdogan (I don't really know many Turks, he's just an example from TV).

[treehau5]

(Sorry if I am reading too deep into this) There are Mediterranean Greeks, Italian, and Spainards, and there are "White" Greeks, Italian, and Spaniards.

(Pardon the invocation of Godwin's law here) When Hitler envisioned his Aryan race, a source of influence was the classical "Athenian Greek." (Another random tidbit, as the story goes, he had such respect for the Greeks, it was with great reluctance that he invaded /greekpride ) Many Greeks still have Blonde hair, blue eyes, and hardly any hair, like my mother and her side of the family. Compare that to my father, who is from an island in Greece, we are basically darker than most Arabs you meet (and indeed thats how I came out. I am more easily passed as an Arab, specifically an Egyptian at times)

(To continue on my random tirade, sorry) If you basically draw an oval around the Mediterranean, from the Greek Islands, Sicily, to parts of Morroco, and such, you could basically pick a few people at random and we would all look related like brothers or cousins to most Americans.

And yes I am one of those crazy people who advocates Mediterranean as a different race than "White." All my life filling out forms, and applications, and throughout schooling, I had to mark down "White" and feel as if I was fraudulent. I am not sure what exactly the US uses as its criteria for a "race" but we are as different from a Anglo-Saxon, Western European type as Native Americans are. We have our distinct features (usually big noses, pronounced foreheads, and lots of hair!), share common values, and even have our own diseases!(see Mediterranean blood disease)

[pluma]

Racism in Germany is not the same as racism in the US or necessarily other parts of the EU.

"Südländer" ("people from Southern countries") are effectively treated as an ethnic group, although this includes Italians and Spaniards alongside Turks (but in some cases also Arabs and other non-"whites"). There's also the racist slur "Ölauge" ("oil-eye"), which while ostensibly about eye colour is typically used to refer to "Südländer"s.

There are also "Osteuropäer" ("Eastern Europeans"), which effectively refers to Slavs but also "Deutschrussen" (i.e. descendants of German settlers in Eastern Europe who migrated back to Germany recently but are culturally distinct from "native" Germans).

I do agree however that "racism" in Germany tends to be less about specific "foreign" ethnicities (as in the US) but more about nationality (or nationality of the parents/ancestors) -- there's no denying that well-adjusted black Germans face discrimination in Germany but so do less well-adjusted Italians. It's more of a blanket ethno-nationalism than the typical racism you hear about on the anglophone interwebs.

It's not really surprising if you think about the historical roots: while Germany has a colonial history and thus isn't a stranger to mistreating brown people, our history is overshadowed by the Third Reich and its ideals about nationalism and racial purity (blonde, blue-eyed "Aryans" being distinct from mere "whites"). The US OTOH had an entire civil war about slave ownership and even then carried on a long tradition of racial apartheid.

[pessimizer]

US racism used to be more variegated like this, but more and more ethnicities got folded into "whiteness" over time (and along with the rise in the fear of blackness.)

White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race by Ian Haney Lopez covers the legal history of whiteness in the US.

[pluma]

That's not entirely what I was referring to, though. The race construct (for an example with horrible consequences look up the history of the ethnic tensions that let to the Rwanda genocide) seems to be largely based on colonialism.

German racism tends to be based largely on anti-immigrant nationalism and xenophobia. It's closer to American racism towards Latinas/-os (and people who fall in the same mental category) than to American racism towards black people.

But maybe we do have the kind of racism black people experience in the US and we're just culturally less aware of it because our ethnic demographics are different.

Without delving too deeply into armchair sociology I think that two major events defining our biases are 1) the attitude towards (predominantly Turkish) immigrants in the third quarter of the last century and 2) the immigration of Russian Germans after WW2.

The Turkish immigrants were greeted as "guest workers" during the post-war boom of our economy and at the time largely filled the kind of badly paid low prestige jobs that became available en masse as our industry grew. Because we only considered them temporary we never acknowledged them as German and were utterly surprised that they would decide to stay and live in "our" country.

The "German Russians", as I described earlier, were (for the most part) ethnically and culturally German settlers who had of course culturally diverged over the course of a century or so before they migrated back to Germany in the aftermath of WW2 and the post-war tensions between Russia and Germany. They were Germans to the Russians but Russians to the Germans they came home to.

All in all it's a huge mess based on a decades long attitude to immigration that could be at best described as sticking your head in the sand and hoping the migrants just go away again rather than adapting them into our culture or even allowing each other to influence each others' cultures to find a common ground.

But looking at the poverty-stricken immigrant districts around Paris and Brussels I guess we didn't do that badly. Though that relief likely won't help anyone looking even remotely foreign if our ethno-nationalism gets any stronger (for a nightmarish outlook consider the recent election results of the AfD, the German nationalist party).

[tomp]

I'm guessing a better word for this would be "xenophobia".

[pluma]

Okay, a semantics argument.

There's one concept most people (especially those who haven't studied sociology) call "racism". It's a mechanism that used to be very useful for our survival 40k-odd years ago when people who looked different were likely not from our tribe and likely hostile to us or at least had no allegiance to our tribe and could thus not be trusted. They're different, they don't know us, we don't know them, they might hit us over the head with a rock, we should be cautious or even chase them away. In a modern society this instinct is still present but obviously far less helpful and tends to make things difficult for us.

The other concept is also called "racism", although I'd prefer to call it "Racism" (with a capital R). This is what feminists try to talk about when they tell people they're "racists". It's not necessarily about the actions or thoughts of any individual and certainly not about mere acknowledgement of the differences between two cultural or ethnic groups of people. It's about the systemic effect (lowercase r) racism can have in a society, making life hard for people in groups that are already disadvantaged and preventing them from achieving equality.

You could argue that the "technical term" for the former type of racism is actually xenophobia. You could argue that academia gets to define semantics and everybody else please should stop using the terms incorrectly thank you very much. But it's more productive to acknowledge that widely used terms have well-established meanings in colloquial English and communication can ultimately only work if the majority can agree on what they are talking about.

[tomp]

I disagree. Feminists intentionally use a word, loaded with so much (negative) emotion as "racist" specifically for its emotional impact. Another example of this is when left-leaning media writes "anti-abortion and pro-choice" while right-leaning media writes "pro-life and pro-abortion".

Their purpose is not to win arguments with logic. They try to win the spectators over using emotion. They use "racist" to smear their opponents, for allegedly being discriminatory, but they're just the same themselves - they just target other underprivileged groups (e.g. nerds, poor conservatives, ...).

This is elaborated in this post: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...

[sydneysider]

wheres the phobia?

[jakub_h]

In the same place where there's a horse in a seahorse.

[sydneysider]

Hohoho

[venomsnake]

It was always as religious. Just the army and the secular order it imposed prevented the religious people from rising trough the society ranks.

Which of course fueled Erdogan support ...

[gkya]

Well, the religion and religiousness are very complex concepts in Turkey. We (in this case you, the westerners) tend to treat the other as a homogeneous entity, with prejudices based on the extremes (like treating the Catholic curch as an organisation of paedophilia because some members are guilty of it).

Erdogan and AKP do not have that much of actual support, but the conjecture helps them. An oppositional government can only be forced with these: The secular CHP with about 25 percent support, the nationalist-racist MHP, with about 15-20 percent support, and with the kurdish-nationalist, leftist HDP. Last summer the outcome of the elections allowed these to form a government, but MHP, on the night of the ballot declared that under no circumstances would they have an accord with HDP. And somehow, the sleepy, cease-firing PKK started tumultising southeast again, out of nowhere, and people voted for AKP instead of a crisis in which we live with temporary minority governments or with no actual government at all.

[c06n]

> Medium-term, Turkey does actually belong in the EU

German here, I completely agree. I don't necessarily think Turkey would be a good fit for the EU, quite the opposite. But I do believe in the near future Europe will have to solve problems on a large scale that Turkey poses to a way lesser extent. If we cannot handle the Turkey situation, I don't see what future the European way of life (whatever that is supposed to be) has 100 years from now, in an ever changing world.